Empire and the Corporate Media

byArundhati Roy, Amy Goodman

and
Democracy Now!

Dissident Voice

June
7, 2003

Arundhati Roy is the author of the novel The
God of Small Things, for which she received the 1997 Booker Prize. It has
sold six million copies and has been translated into over 20 languages
worldwide. She has also written three non-fiction books: The Cost of Living,
Power Politics and her newest book War Talk, a collection of
essays analyzing issues of war and peace, democracy and dissent, racism and
empire. A year ago she was the recipient of the 2002 Lannan Foundation Prize
for Cultural Freedom. Since Sept. 11, she has emerged as one of the most
eloquent critics of the Bush Administration's so-called war on terror. On May
12, 2003 she joined Democracy Now!
co-hosts Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez in the firehouse studio.

THIS
IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT

AMY
GOODMAN: Well it's a great pleasure to be able to see you face to face and to
talk to you in person. We've spoken to you on the phone many times and I very
much look forward to your address tomorrow night. Well your book has come out
now in a new edition, War Talk and in it, it includes one of the speeches that
we have run a lot here and that is your speech "Come September" that
you gave in Santa Fe. Juan mentioned the issue of media centralization in this
country. In India you see the United States through the lens of--what is it
you've said? Fox is what you watch?

ARUNDHATI
ROY: Fox and CNN I think, are the two channels you get there.

AMY
GOODMAN: So what do you think? What do you think of America through that lens?

ARUNDHATI
ROY: Well you know it's it's true that last year before I came, I was coerced
to come to America because I did think that there was no need for me to come
here and you know be insulted and called names and so on. Because you think of
it as a homogenous place in some way, and I was so delighted to find the
opposite. I was so delighted to find that we who are protesting against these
things on the outside have some of our staunchest allies in America. And I must
say that, it put me in the extraordinary position of defending American citizens
against an assault which is absolutely racist sometimes, outside, because of
these media channels and because of the policies of the US government, people
in America are just seen as a homogenous bunch of rabid, nationalist bullies
and that's such a sad thing because I think if we are going to fight to reclaim
democracy that fight has to begin here. And all of us have to acknowledge that
it is the people of America who have access to the imperial palace. And so, it
was wonderful to come. At the same time, this consolidation of the American
media. I mean I think, one of the good things that happened after September
11th, was that this myth of free speech and the free market crumbled along with
the twin towers you know. Outside America, the American free press has become
the butt of some pretty dark humor and nobody now it's contextualized you know.
When you watch CNN and FOX news--anywaynot everybody, but a lot of people just
watch it as the boardroom bulletin of the White House you know, and know it for
what it is.

JUAN
GONZALEZ: Well in your latest book War Talk, you talk about Empire in a much
broader way than perhaps we're accustomed to discussing here in the US, cause
we're always centering in on the US Empire and the US's role in world
domination but you talk about Empire and all the allies of Empire in all the
different countries around the world including your own. I'm wondering if you
could expound on that a little bit?

ARUNDHATI
ROY: Well, you know there are two ways that Empire spreads its tentacles, one
is with the cruise missile and the daisy cutter and so on, and the other is
with the IMF checkbook. So you know the argument that is being made across the
world is that the people of Argentina and the people of Iraq have been
decimated by the same process but by different weapons--in one case the cruise
missile, in the other case, the check book. And what happened was just like the
colonial enterprise which needed the collusion of native elites you know, it
wasn't as though Britain had huge armies stationed in India, it had the Indian
elite colluding with it. In the same way now, this project of corporate
globalization has the collusion of local elites in third world countries you
know. And so what happens is that you have a process in which the white man
doesn't even have to come to the hot countries and get malaria and diarrhea and
die an early death because it is being managed on their behalf by governments
like say the government in India or the government in South Africa who are
willingly genuflecting to that process. And a situation in which, very
interestingly say you look at a country like South Africa you know, 1994
apartheid officially ended. By 1996, the ANC who had fought so hard and people
who had fought so hard for that freedom look what's happened to them. Out of a
population of 44 million, 10 million have had their water and electricity cut
off and you have the traditional power, the white power in say South Africa,
more secure and happier than it's ever been cause it's apartheid with a clean
conscience now and it's called democracy.

AMY
GOODMAN: How do you decide when to write fiction and when to write non-fiction?

ARUNDHATI
ROY: That's a very, very troubling question, you know becausewell I don't
decide, it's somehow decided somewhere else in the ether. But the fact is that
for me, fiction is my love. Fiction is what makes me happy. The other writing
that I do, each time I write I swear that I'll never do it again. It's sort of
wrenched out of me andit ends up--I end up paying a price for it which I'm not
sure that I want to pay. And that's not just in prison sentences, or criticism
or insults which I have my share of, but even the other--you know it keeps
pushing you into this very public place where you know there are times when you
don't want to be. You want to be tentative and you want to be uncertain and you
don't want to-to--to sort of bang your fist on the table and yet I know that
there are times in the world when you can't look at it as what you want to do
or where you want to be. You have to intervene. It's like I never, ever decide
to write something in terms of my essays, you know. Like if someone asks mesome
newspaper asks me will you write this or someone asks me, I will say no. It's
just when something happens and I read about what's happening, and then I know
that there's something that hasn't been said which I want to say and it sets up
this hammering in my head and I can't keep quiet and I have to do it and I do
it and I--most of the time regret it immediately.

AMY
GOODMAN: We have to break for stations to identify themselves but we will be
back with Arundhati Roy here live in our firehouse studios just blocks from
ground zero, from where the towers of the world trade center once stood.

(music
break)

AMY
GOODMAN: I'm Amy Goodman, with Juan Gonzalez Our guest is Arundhati Roy.
Arundhati Roy's books: The God of Small Things, a novel; her essays collected
as The Cost of Living, one book; Power Politics and her latest is War Talk,
published by South End Press, an independent press in this country. Arundhati
can you talk about where you grew up, where you were born, where you grew up,
and on this day after Mother's Day, your mother, Mary Roy.

ARUNDHATI
ROY: Well, I was born in a town called Shillong, that is in the north-east of
India. You know India is like--more complicated than the whole of Europe, so
you know, My mother was--is from South India in a state called Kerala. My
father is from Bengal. I was born in Shillong which at the time was in a state
called Assam. But now it isn't. And my parents were divorced when I was about
one or something, and I came back with my mother to Kerala, where I grew up in
a village called Aymanam, which is the village in which The God of Small Things
is set. She comes from a community of Syrian Christians who are Christians who
believe they were converted at the time when St. Thomas traveled east after the
crucifixion of Christ. But the first real evidence of that is around the 8th
century. Anyway it's a very small parochial community and my mother was sort of
shunned for being this woman who dared to marry a Hindu outside her community
and then got divorced and came back to the village with her children and so on.
So I suppose now that that is behind me I have to look at it as fortunate,
because I grew up on the edges of an extremely feudal, suffocating society
whereyou know which was not prepared to assure me, the assurances that it would
hold out to other sort of you know, children who belonged to that community.
One was outside it cause you were not of it. And because I grew up in Kerala
which has traditionally been a communist state, it was very interesting because
you had Christianity, Hinduism, Muslims, Marxists all sort of rubbing each
other down and you lived outside the framework--I lived outside the framework
of all this. Growing up in a rural area, but at the same time having, the--
being educated in the ways that other people would not have been in a rural
area. So I keep saying that as a writer it was a lucky place to be at the top
of the bottom of the heap. Somehow, without the perspective, this sort of
tunnel vision of the completely oppressed. Without the paranoia of the
cojmpletelyof the oppressors. Somehow you grew up in -- the cracks between this
very complex society.

JUAN
GONZALEZ: And why was it that Kerala, being as you mentioned, such a feudal and
rural place could then develop to have a communist administration so early on.
What were the conditions and dynamics that gave rise to that? What kind of
impact did that have on your consciousness?

ARUNDHATI
ROY: Well, don't make the mistake of assuming that the communists aren't
feudal. Theythey are more progressive than others, so what they did was to
harness that feudalism to kind of not challenge it in some way. So the irony of
course is that the communists are all upper caste people and very intellectual
and so on. But the situation isthat's what The God of Small Things is all
about, you know, where you have aKerala is the only place in India where they
claim a hundred percent literacy and yet the kind ofthe kind of oppression that
you see there or the kind of attitudes towards women that you see there is so
suffocating you know. My mother is, I didn't talk about her. She is the
mostshe's a remarkable woman. Also someone who I often think kind of escaped
from the sets of a Fellini film but that's a separate thing. And sheshe
reallyit was a combination of her being in this place where she was shunned and
you know ridiculed for who she was, and so I never grew up being told that I
should play by the rules, you know, which is very lucky for me. But I find
myself in this really strange position cause so many years of my life I spent
fighting to escape the suffocation of tradition as an Indian woman, and I got
there only to be up against the bestiality of the modern world which I don't
want either, you know so you're somehow in this narrow alley between these two
monolithic, monstrous things and you know sometimes, you don't know where to go
with it. Every single decision that you make is a decision and a political one,
you know, for that reason.

AMY
GOODMAN: Your mother ran a school and also stood up for women's rights in
India?

ARUNDHATI
ROY: Yeah, my mother runs a school. I studied there. She started it when she
left my father. She started it with seven children, two of whom were her own.
It used to be what I called the sliding, folding school cause it used to be in
the premises of the Rotary club. In the evenings the men used to meet and drink
and smoke cigarettes and throw the butts and their dirty glasses on the floor.
In the morning we would come and clean it all up and you know, open up the
furniture and it used to be the school and then in the evening they would come
and dirty it up again. Now of course it's a beautiful school on the outskirts
of this little town called Kotayem and yeah, she still runs it. It's a fabulous
place. She became very well known my mother because you know, she filed a case,
a public litigation case in the Supreme Court of India, challenging a law which
said that Syrian Christian women could inherit one fourth of their father's
property or five thousand rupees which is aboutwhich is less than a hundred
dollars, whichever is less. So she challenged that and said it was
unconstitutional and the law was changed with retrospective effect giving women
equal rights. So that was a very, very big thing then. Not that it has made
such a huge difference cause whatthat was a law in case a man didn't leave a
will, in case a father didn't leave a will. So now of course they are taking
will-making classes on how to disinherit their daughters.

AMY
GOODMAN: And now, like it or not, Arundhati Roy, you've ended up in court
yourself on several occasions. One had to do with your own book as people --
men in Kerala called The God of Small Things obscene, or at least in some
sections of it. And then in your own activism around the issue of dams in
India. Can you talk about both?

ARUNDHATI
ROY: In The God of Small Things, I was accused of corrupting public morality
which the case is still in court actually and I keep saying there is a
technical legal issue here because at least it should have been "further
corrupting public morality" since I can't believe public morality was pure
until I came along. But--In India the legal system is like this lumbering
thing. It's partlike 75% of it is about harassment. It's not about conviction.
It's not about what will happen at the end. It's about court appearances and
paying lawyers and disrupting your life and so on. You know it's used for that
reason. For me to go from Delhi to Kerala to appear it's almost like going from
Delhi to London it's so far away. And I'll go there and the judge will arrive
and he says "everybody is ready to argue the case," and he says
"everytime this case comes before me I get chest pains and I don't want to
decide it." You know cause he knows that everybody is waiting for him to
say something and he doesn't want to so, then it's dismissed and it's been
going on for years. The other one is much more serious, was much more serious
and is much more serious. Because, you know there are two ways of looking at
it. One is just personally the court harassing a writer, a famous writer or
whatever. But that's not as important as if I can explain an issue of
democracy. Because you see people now have begun to think of democracy as
elections, you know, that's it. That's the only genuflection you have to make
in the direction of democracy. But in actual fact, it is a lateral system of
checks and balances with various institutions checking each other and balancing
each other.

Now
in India, the Supreme Court is perhaps the most powerful institution in our
so-called "democracy". And now it takes decisions which areit's a
micro-management of Indian society. It decides whether slums should be cleared,
whether dams should be built, whether industry should be privatized, whether
diesel should be the public fuel or it should be compressed natural gas,
whether industry should be moved out of a city or not, whether history text
books should contain such and such a chapter or not, whether this mosque should
be built or not. Every single decision is taken today by the Supreme Court of
India. Now there is a law called contempt of court which says that you cannot
criticize the Supreme Court. You can criticize a judgment, but you can't say,
put a series of judgments together and say "look there's a very distinct
politics emerging here." A wide -- you can't question it except in their
terms let's say. So that makes it an institution which is completely
undemocratic. And I was you know hauled up on contempt of court. And I was
saying: "You can't have this law. You can't have this law and call
yourself a democracy. It's a judicial dictatorship." And that's what it
is. People are terrified, terrified of the Supreme Court.

JUAN
GONZALEZ: And why do you think that that has evolved in that way, this judicial
dictatorship? What in the political development of Indian society has allowed
the court to exercise such power?

ARUNDHATI
ROY: Well I think the philosophical answer to that is we are still a feudal
society who looks to authority somehow, you know. But really what has happened
is that, you know, power looks for ways in which to subvert democracy at all
times. And so you have a situation where you have a very corrupt political
elite. You have a media that is increasingly becoming a corporate media. And so
you have this court. It's like you have a system. You have this contempt of
court now, which is a law, which means that the court works like a manhole,
like a floor trap. It attracts all the power because it's not accountable and
it's able to exercise unaccountable power. Today, if I had documentary evidence
of a corrupt judge - say I had evidence of a judge having taken a bribe for
making a particular judgment ­ I can't put that evidence before the court
because it's contempt of court. Truth is not a defense in contempt of court. So
you can imagine the extent of power that is being exercised. It's completely
unaccountable. And now having put me in jail on this, what has happened is that
the message has gone out to the Indian media that "Don't mess with us ­ if
we can do this to her, you think of what we can do to a journalist in a little
town who has no money, who can't hire a lawyer, who doesn't have the protection
of, you know, being a public figure." They can just be thrown in jail.
They lose their jobs. They lose everything. So they just allow the court this
wide berth. And it keeps going. You know, sometimes it makes judgments which
are good. But most of the time, its judgments, at the moment, are
retrogressive, you know? And of course those judgments suit the middle class;
it suits the Indian elite so the court is a holy cow. So they say "Oh but
how can she, you know, like, - there should be respect for something, you know?
That hierarchical way of thinking.

AMY
GOODMAN: We're talking to Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things. Her
latest book is War Talk. We'll be back with her in a minute.

music
break)

AMY
GOODMAN: Sheila Chandra ­ Roots and Wings ­ here on Democracy Now!, the War and
Peace report. I'm Amy Goodman and, with Juan Gonzalez, our guest is the
acclaimed writer, Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things, The Cost of
Living, Power Politics, and War Talk. War Talk is her latest book, collection
of essays. You were just talking about going to court. Maybe if you could
briefly tell us about the issue of the dams in India. And then we can talk
about, for those who watch us on TV in our breaks, we were just showing
Gujarat. You can talk about what's happening there.

ARUNDHATI
ROY: Well, the issue of big dams in India is really somehow a microcosm ­ it's
not a microcosm; it's such a big issue ­ but it tells the story of modern India
and the model of development that that country has chosen to follow. There is a
river called the Narmada in central India, which, you know, on which this
Narmada Valley Development Project has proposed to build 3,200 dams on a single
river. Now for years, there's been a very spectacular resistance movement
against the building of these dams by people who stand to be displaced by them.
And in early 1999, in an interim judgment, the Supreme Court decided to allow
this very controversial dam to be built. And I wrote an essay called "The
Greater Common Good" where I... you know when I traveled in the Narmada
Valley and found things that shocked me, shocked me. Among which were not the
facts that exist but the facts that don't exist. And one of them was that there
were no figures for how many people have been displaced by big dams in India
because big dams are like secular temples, you know? And I calculated that
figure to be 33 million people, which of course at the time I wrote the essay,
was marked and people said "How can that be?" and so on.
Subsequently, the World Commission on Dams did an India country study where
they placed it at almost 56 million people, all of whom are obviously the
poorest, the "untouchables," the indigenous peoples. And so the whole
thing again is a critique of how you centralize natural resources; how you
snatch them from the poor and redistribute them to the rich. And that process
of course was carried out pretty successfully by the corrupt Indian state, as
in all third world countries. But now it's become even worse, because that
process is being privatized. And theŠyou know, it's like... everybody thought,
"Oh this doesn't work for us so maybe privatization will make it all efficient
and just." And in fact it's like giving a malaria patient medicine for
jaundice. It's become so very much worse, so very frightening. Thousands of
people are now being pushed off their lands, not just by dams but by the
corporatization of agriculture, the privatization of water, you know, the whole
process of the WTO. And now you have reports from all over of Indian farmers
committing suicide by the hundreds because they are not able to cope. And
there's a drought looming. So obviously these are issues that are complex and I
can't really, you know, I can't convey anything but the urgency on a radio
program. But I have written about it in some depth.

JUAN
GONZALEZ: You talk, again in the speech you did at Porto Allegre, which is
reproduced in your book War Talk about not being forced to choose between the
mad moolahs and the malevolent Mickey Mouses as a choice that was being
confronted by many people in the Third World. But interesting that I've
mentioned this on the program several times, the Pakistani Marxist Tariq Ali in
his book, Clash of Fundamentalisms, lays out the theory that really the
resurgence of fundamentalism, in the Middle East especially, was a direct
product of British and American imperialism. And their attempts to prevent the
Indian modernists, Gandhi and others, from moving forward, to prevent the
Egyptian progressives of the 1950s and 60s ­ they supported the rise of
fundamentalism and in essence there is some tie between the continuing process
of imperialism, both British and US, and the rise of fundamentalism in the
Middle East and in India and Pakistan. I'm wondering your thoughts about that.

ARUNDHATI
ROY: I completely agree, except that he should bring India into it too. If you
look at things now, there has never been a close association between the US
government and any Indian government before. And today we have what can only be
described as a very quick march towards fascism, towards religious fascism. And
the Indian government and the Indian government and the Israeli government are
more or less aligned on this, you know? And if you see how there's a
connection, not just between - yeah, well corporate globalization is a project
of imperialism, if you like. And you see how closely those two things are
allied and you see how what is happening in India ­ the massacre, the
state-supervised massacre of Muslim people on the street of Gujarat ­ is not
being condemned; is being allowed to... is almost being approved of now in the
way things are going there. And of course, there's a link between... it suits
this project really well, fundamentalism, religious fundamentalism of any kind.

AMY
GOODMAN: Gujarat. It is between who?

ARUNDHATI
ROY: Between Hindus and Muslims and...

AMY
GOODMAN: But where does the government stand on this?

ARUNDHATI
ROY: (laughs) The Indian government today is the BJP, which hasŠit is called
the sang parivar which in Hindi means "the family" you know, of
basically Hindu right-wing political parties, cultural guilds, goon squads. And
between themselves, they divide the labor. But last year at this time, in
Gujarat, the BJP government headed by a person called Narendra Modi, sponsored,
supervised, oversaw the slaughter of 2000 Muslims on the streets of Gujarat.
150,000 were driven from their homes. Women were gang-raped and burned alive.
And after that, he won the elections, you know? It's a very big crisis for our
notion of democracy. While that was happening, while the slaughter was
happening on the streets of Gujarat, I was being put into prison for contempt
of court by the Supreme Court. Not a single murderer, not a single person there
was proceeded against. But they all stood for elections. And they won. So how
do you call that democracy? What is the difference between democracy and
majoritarianism and where does it shade into fascism? And where does
nationalism fit in all this?

AMY
GOODMAN: You talk about the major forces that people on the ground are up
against when you talk about the dams, when you talk about globalization. If we
can end also on the issue of war, invasion, and now, occupation -- what about
the force of the people? I think of the women, your friends, who are willing to
drown, to stand in the areas that they are supposed to be displaced from to say
"the waters can rise; we won't leave."

ARUNDHATI
ROY: Well, you know, I think we need to... I'm in a state right now where I
feel that we need to reexamine our ideas of resistance. I think we need to
think about this very carefully, because we saw perhaps the most spectacular
display of public morality ever on the 15th of February when millions of people
across five continents marched against the war. It was discarded with disdain.
Those marches were important. Those marches were important for us to rally our
forces, to understand our strengths. But those marches didn't affect the other
side. So we need to now understand that the time has come for civil disobedience
to become real. It's no longer symbolic. The marches can only be the symbol of
something else that's real that we are doing, you know? Our meetings in Porto
Allegre, our marches, and our demonstrations are for us. But they are not
weapons when using against them, you know? So we need to now change our way of
thinking to be effective. It's enough of being right; now we need to win. And
now we need to win not necessarily by confronting empire, but by taking it
apart part by part, and disabling those parts. I think we need to make a list
of every single company that has benefited from a reconstruction contract in
Iraq and we need to go after them and we need to shut them down. That's what we
need to do. We can't think that...it's beyond the stage of resistance songs and
marches; those are for us. Those are important for us. But we need to pick
these people off one by one because we can't confront empire. We can't confront
it all together. We can't...nobody can deal with America's war machine. But we
need to reverse those sanctions, you know. We need to make people sanctions. We
need to look to our strengths and do it right. We need to... undo the nuts and
bolts of empire.

JUAN
GONZALEZ: And it could also be though that the reaching deeper into the populations
of these various countries so that those sectors of the population, whether
it's people who work in these industries or the people who provide the shipping
for the tankersŠin other words, at a certain point a movement will reach those
sectors of the population that have a decisive impact, if they're organized
sufficiently, to push back.

ARUNDHATI
ROY: Absolutely. You need to get to the people who say "We will not move
this missile from the warehouse to the dock."

JUAN
GONZALEZ: (overlapping) Or the soldiers. Or the soldiers themselves.

ARUNDHATI
ROY: Yeah.

AMY
GOODMAN: And do you see that happening? Is there somewhere that is giving you
hope?

ARUNDHATI
ROY: Well, I think I'm a pre-programmed optimist, you know? So I'm the wrong
person to ask. But I think the point is, that for people like us, we have to do
this anyway. We have to do what we do anyway, whether there's hope or despair
is a way of seeing. But even if there wasn't hope, I would still be doing what
I do. Because that's what I do; that's who I am; that's how I am. So we can't
be only fighting because there's hope. If there's only despair, the reasons to
fight are even greater.

AMY
GOODMAN: Well I want to thank you very much for being with us. When you speak
at Riverside Church, what will the name of your speech be? Have you decided
yet?

AMY
GOODMAN: Well, I very much look forward to seeing it and hearing you speak then
afterwards to Howard Zinn. And in NY, there still is overflow seating. The
tickets sold out within hours of them going out, I think about a month ago.
Thousands of people have already gotten tickets. It's up at Riverside Church on
the Upper West Side of Manhattan if people want to go tomorrow night, Tuesday
night at 7:00. Arundhati Roy, I want to thank you very much for being with us.
It's been a privilege.

ARUNDHATI
ROY: Thank you, Amy.

AMY
GOODMAN: Arundhati Roy, her latest book is War Talk. It is published by South
End Press. And that does it for the program.

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